I was almost physically shocked several years ago when I read that Israeli troops with bulldozers had wantonly destroyed many acres of olive groves in Gaza. (This was before the wall and the siege.) I had spent enough time in Italy and Greece to know olive groves intimately, to know how many years it took in growing for one to bear, and to know how vitally important olive groves were for a rural economy. I also had come to believe that on olive tree was in itself beautiful.

I cook my breakfast eggs in olive oil, and so it was only the next morning that this poem began to shape itself. It seemed necessary to have a passage on how some (Americans?) think of the trees as ugly and to counter that. Then, of course, the Bible leapt forward and the symbol of peace.

It was always going to be a short poem, and my eggs were just about done, but here I identified with the Gazan farmer, whose breakfast may not have existed, so I returned to the Bible, remembering the super-muscular Samson “eyeless in Gaza” (Milton’s phrase), the Israeli who could destroy.